Maxime de la Rocheterie on Marie-Antoinette

"She was not a guilty woman, neither was she a saint; she was an upright, charming woman, a little frivolous, somewhat impulsive, but always pure; she was a queen, at times ardent in her fancies for her favourites and thoughtless in her policy, but proud and full of energy; a thorough woman in her winsome ways and tenderness of heart, until she became a martyr."

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

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Unless otherwise noted, any books I review on this blog I have either purchased or borrowed from the library, and I do not receive any compensation (monetary or in-kind) for the reviews.

Saturday, September 23, 2017

Hillary Clinton’s campaign memoir rests on an
astonishingly audacious lie: that the very FBI director who made her
campaign possible by improperly sparing her from an indictment doomed
it. A normal pol who had mishandled classified information as
egregiously as Hillary would have felt eternal gratitude to Comey. Only
an entitled ingrate like Hillary would have the gall to cast her savior
as the chief thorn in her side.

Nor does Hillary acknowledge
another in-kind contribution to her campaign from Comey: his willingness
to serve as a cog in Obama’s campaign of political espionage against
Trump. Obama’s team of Hillary partisans, which included among others
John Brennan, Susan Rice, and Loretta Lynch, wanted Comey to snoop on
Trumpworld and he duly did.

It was reported this week that the FBI
had until as recently as earlier this year been intercepting the
communications of Paul Manafort, one of Trump’s campaign chairmen. This
means that Comey, contrary to his lawyerly denial of Trump’s wiretapping
claim, had the means to eavesdrop on any communications between
Manafort and Trump.

Even at this late date, quibbling partisans in
the media say that is insufficient proof of Trump’s claim. But could
anyone imagine the Maggie Habermans bothering with such pedantry if
George Bush’s FBI director had been snooping on David Axelrod? The same
generation of reporters who watched All the President’s Men
breathlessly now shill for the propriety of political espionage. They
rush to offer what they consider high-minded reasons for wiretaps of
Trump campaign officials. But those reasons, at least as this point,
amount to nothing more than the haziest gossip. One of the supposed
reasons for the wiretaps, rich in irony given Hillary’s complaint that
foreigners interfered in the election, is that an ex-Brit spy, probably
on Comey’s payroll (the FBI still won’t address this matter) and
certainly on the payroll of pro-Hillary partisans, told U.S. government
officials that Manafort was colluding with the Russians.

[...]

The scandal at the center of the 2016 election was not that Trump
colluded with Russians to win but that the media and the Obama
administration colluded with Hillary to defeat him. The loudest cries of
“foreign influence over the election” came from Hillary partisans who
sought it, whether it was John Brennan running off to England and
Estonia to collect dirt on Trump from their spies or deep-state clowns
at the FBI who wanted to turn Christopher Steele into an asset. The
villain, in this sorry fable, turned out to be the victim. (Read more.)

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